Amid “unrelenting attacks on civilians and on civilian infrastructure” and as a new campaign aims to block the Obama administration from selling $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, new reporting sheds further light on the devastation the kingdom’s military coalition, backed by the U.S. and U.K., has wrought on Yemen’s population.

Over one-third of all the coalition’s air strikes in Yemen have hit civilian targets like schools and hospitals, the Guardianreports Friday.

In fact, there have been “repeated strikes on school buildings and hospitals.”

In five of the past 18 months, the Guardian continues, “the Saudi-led coalition hit more non-military sites than military.”

The revelation is based on a survey of the strikes conducted by the Yemen Data Project. From the Guardian:

The independent and non-partisan survey, based on open-source data, including research on the ground, records more than 8,600 air attacks between March 2015, when the Saudi-led campaign began, and the end of August this year. Of these, 3,577 were listed as having hit military sites and 3,158 struck non-military sites. […]

Staff at the Yemen Data Project said they adopted rigorous standards, using news reports aligned with both sides in the conflict and crosschecked against other sources, such as social media, non-governmental organizations and evidence on the ground.

The findings, the paper writes, “will refocus attention on U.K. arms sales to Saudi Arabia” and its role in the war.

Asked about the findings, Saudi foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir dismissed the claim that civilian sites were targeted, telling the Guardian that Houthi rebels “turned schools and hospitals and mosques into command and control centers. They have turned them into weapons depots.”

This Senate Resolution of Disapproval would attempt to block the latest U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and send a strong bipartisan signal to the Saudi government that the U.S. is not going to continue arming Saudi Arabia so long as its military continues to commit abuses in Yemen without any accountability. Tell your Senator to support this resolution now.

The human rights organization say the Senate is set to vote on the resolution Sept. 20.

Additional reporting this week by the Associated Press puts a human face on the high levels of child malnourishment gripping the port city and surrounding area of Hodeidah.

“There is an accelerating increase in the number of children suffering malnutrition,” Ossan al-Abbsi, a pediatrician at Hodeidah’s central hospital, told AP. “We used to have five cases while the rest of the beds were empty on any given day. Now, you can never find an empty bed in our unit.”

In the country overall, the UN says, 1.5 million children suffer from life-threatening malnutrition.

Last month, Julien Harneis, UNICEF representative in Yemen, said, “Children are paying the heaviest price of the conflict in Yemen.”

U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen Jamie McGoldrick said recently that he was “deeply disturbed by the unrelenting attacks on civilians and on civilian infrastructure throughout Yemen by all parties to the conflict, which are further destroying Yemen’s social fabric and increasing humanitarian needs, particularly for medical attention at a time when the health sector is collapsing.”

McGoldrick said last month that the death toll from the ongoing conflict surpassed 10,000.

About ew

ew came of age during the winddown to the Vietnam War, and like many other Americans, as soon there wasn't an issue that didn't affect him personally, he became indifferent. This gradually changed during the Reagan and Bush I years, continued through the Clinton years and finally came to a head with the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. He works as a freelance consultant/tester for various music hardware and software companies, and lives in Minnesota with his cat and other weird and wonderful noise machines.